What is MMR in League of Legends? (And How to Fix Bad MMR)

You win a game and gain 14 LP. You lose the next one and drop 22 LP. You win again — 13 LP. After three wins and two losses you've gone nowhere. Sound familiar? That's MMR at work, and understanding it is the single most important thing you can do to understand why your ranked experience feels the way it does.

MMR is not a mystery — it's a number, it follows rules, and once you understand it, you know exactly what to do to make it work for you instead of against you.

What MMR Actually Is

MMR stands for Matchmaking Rating. It is a hidden number assigned to every League of Legends account that represents your true estimated skill level. It goes up when you win and down when you lose — but unlike LP, it is never shown to you directly.

Riot uses MMR for two purposes: to find opponents of similar skill for your games, and to determine how much LP you gain or lose after each match. It is the engine running behind every ranked game you play, and it operates completely independently of your visible rank badge.

Think of it this way: your rank is your public title. Your MMR is what the system actually thinks you deserve. When the two are aligned, you gain and lose LP in roughly equal amounts. When they're misaligned, the math gets punishing.

MMR vs LP — What's the Difference?

LP (League Points) is the visible progress bar toward your next rank promotion. It goes from 0 to 100, and reaching 100 promotes you. MMR is the invisible rating that controls how fast you move through that bar.

• LP — visible, resets between tiers, determines your rank badge
• MMR — hidden, never resets mid-season, determines LP gain/loss amounts

The critical insight: your rank tells people where you are, but your MMR determines how fast you get somewhere else. Two players can both be Gold II but one gains 22 LP per win while the other gains 14. The difference is MMR.

How MMR Controls Your LP Gains and Losses

The rule is simple: if your MMR is above your current rank's expected MMR, you gain more LP per win and lose less per loss. The system is trying to pull your rank up to match your MMR. If your MMR is below your rank, the opposite happens — you gain less and lose more, because the system is trying to pull your rank down.

The math matters a lot. With bad MMR at +13/−23, you need to win 64% of your games just to stay even. With healthy MMR at +21/−19, a 53% win rate is enough to climb steadily. Bad MMR doesn't just slow you down — it can make climbing genuinely impossible even if you're the best player in your games.

Signs Your MMR Is Broken

You don't need a tool to diagnose bad MMR — the symptoms are clear:

The most common cause of bad MMR is a losing streak early in a season or during placements. When you lose multiple games in a row, MMR drops sharply — and it takes a disproportionately long time to repair, because you need a sustained winning streak to pull the number back up. A few wins here and there won't undo a 10-game losing skid; the system needs to see consistent performance over time.

How to Check Your MMR

Riot doesn't publish MMR publicly, but you can estimate it from your LP gains. Open your match history and look at the last 10 ranked games. Calculate your average LP gain per win and average LP loss per defeat. Then use this rough guide:

• +20 LP or more per win: Your MMR is above your current rank — keep playing, you'll climb naturally.
• +17 to +19 LP per win: MMR is roughly aligned with your rank. Normal climbing conditions.
• +14 to +16 LP per win: MMR is slightly below your rank. Climbing is possible but slower than it should be.
• +13 LP or fewer per win: MMR is significantly damaged. Self-climbing is very difficult. A win boost is the most efficient fix.

Third-party sites like WhatIsMyMMR.com can give a rough estimate based on your recent match data, though these are approximations and work better for some servers than others.

How to Fix Bad MMR

Option 1: Win Streak (Self-Repair)

The only organic way to repair MMR is a sustained winning streak — typically 7 or more consecutive wins will begin moving your LP gains noticeably. Each win raises your MMR, which gradually shifts the gain/loss ratio back in your favor. The problem is that this is harder to achieve when the math is already working against you: you need to play significantly better than your rank to overcome the deficit, which is a tall ask if you're playing into opponents who match your actual MMR.

Option 2: Win Boost (Fast Repair)

A win boost is the fastest and most reliable way to repair broken MMR. Because each boosted win raises your MMR directly, a block of 5–10 wins from a high-elo booster achieves what would otherwise require weeks of self-grinding — and it does so at a guaranteed pace rather than depending on match outcomes. After the boost, your LP gains will reflect the corrected MMR, and you'll climb normally from there.

If your LP gains are currently in the +12–14 range, even 5 wins in a row can shift it toward +16–18. Ten consecutive wins often restores it fully to the +20 range. You can calculate exactly what a win boost would cost for your rank on our Pricing page — the LP Gain option on the order form is specifically designed for players dealing with low-LP-gain situations.

Option 3: Fresh Start

Some players with severely damaged MMR consider starting a new account (smurf). This works in the sense that placements on a fresh account let you build MMR from scratch. The downsides are obvious — you lose your account history, cosmetics, and champion collection. It's the nuclear option, and usually unnecessary unless the MMR damage is extreme.

For most players, a targeted win boost is both faster and cheaper than the time investment of leveling a new account and re-earning your collection. You can read more about how boosting interacts with your account in our ELO boosting worth it guide.